Breakfast with Angela
by M. D. Jensen
Summary: After the events of The Hole in the Heart, Angela and Arastoo get breakfast. Just a  very  little attempt to flesh out some of the interns. Also contains small spoilers for The Signs in the Silence.


Disclaimer: I do not own Bones (or Jeopardy).

Summary: After the events of The Hole in the Heart, Angela and Arastoo get breakfast. Just a (very) little attempt to flesh out some of the interns. Also contains small spoilers for The Signs in the Silence.

AN, ETA: hey! I'm just coming back a few hours later to edit a few typos I noticed (cringe), and wanted to thank you for the reviews! Seven in nine hours for a fic centered around a rarer character. Awesome! Thank you so much, and I'm glad that this is making some of you feel better!

_Breakfast with Angela_

He had expected her to be late. Angela seemed like the kind of woman who would be, only because she knew that anyone in their right mind would wait for her. But when Arastoo stepped into the diner five minutes before they had agreed to meet, she was already there, at a table in the far corner. He watched her for a moment before approaching. Her eyes were cast down at the table before her; one hand rested protectively on her stomach while the other traced aimlessly on the table. She looked so sad, and so beautiful, that Arastoo felt his heart crack a little further.

She looked up at the sound of his footsteps, and her face broke into a genuine smile. "Arastoo," she breathed, then struggled to push back her chair.

"Don't get up," Arastoo insisted, smiling. "Really, Angela."

"Okay." She sighed, slumping back into her chair. "That's probably good because I swear I might have gone into labor right here and now."

"Let's avoid that if at all possible." He slipped into the chair opposite hers. "So how are you?"

"Mm... feeling particularly affected by gravity today. How are you?"

"Fine."

Angela's eyebrows knitted together at his response. "I've been crying," she told him gently, then looked at him as though waiting for his real answer in turn. Arastoo lowered his eyes as he felt her gaze sweep over him. He didn't know where to begin. "Okay," she murmured. "Well, let's get food. Have you ever seen a pregnant woman eat breakfast? I'm sorry to say you're about to."

She raised her hand and grabbed the waitress's attention immediately. Just another skill of hers, Arastoo mused. She ordered orange juice, scrambled eggs, bacon, and sausage, then after a moment's thought, a cheese danish. Then both women turned on him. "Coffee, please," he said quietly, suddenly struck by an irrational stage fright.

"You're not gonna eat anything?" Angela asked as the waitress left for the kitchen. Arastoo looked up and met her eyes. If she really wanted to know how he was, this was the perfect time to tell her. Tell her how he hadn't managed to eat anything more than a few bananas and some toast for the past three days. Tell her how he hadn't managed to keep most of that down anyway. Tell her how every time he even looked at food, he thought of some shadowy autopsy doctor investigating the contents of Vincent's stomach.

"I'm not a big breakfast person," he offered weakly.

"Suit yourself."

She didn't seem offended, but as she skimmed the local business ads on the paper placemat, Arastoo began to feel a bit ungrateful. She hadn't had to reach out to him; she could have done as all the others did and forgotten about him as soon as his turn on rotation was over, not remembering him again until his next case. And even if she had remembered him, she hadn't had to remember his mismatched yet meaningful friendship with Vincent Nigel-Murray. And she certainly hadn't had to ask him to breakfast to check up on him after the shooting.

"I really appreciate you doing this, Angela." The words came out in a single gust of air.

"Of course. Hey, do you remember when Roxie and I broke up a few years ago, and you made me that mix tape?" He nodded. "You're a sweet guy. Sweet guys deserve to have someone ask how they are."

"I'm okay."

"You're not."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because I happen to know that you love breakfast."

Again there was that brokenness beating in his chest, but Arastoo smiled. "I guess I've been better."

"Mm. Me too." The waitress returned with Angela's food and Arastoo's coffee, then whisked away again. Angela eyed her plate, then the cup and pot before Arastoo, and shook her head. "I wish I _stopped_ eating when I got stressed. But all my life, when I got stressed, boom. Food time. And you know, I always managed to get away with it before. But they say once you have your first kid... not so much anymore. Oh well. At least- look- I'm getting my protein." She was babbling a little bit, but Arastoo didn't mind. He watched her salt her eggs with utter abandon.

"Angela, you could never not be beautiful," he told her, a bit surprised at the way his voice stuck.

She grinned up at him. "See? Such a sweet guy." She picked up a strip of bacon with her fingers and bit the top off, but put it down when Arastoo looked away. "Oh Arastoo, I forgot you're vegetarian. Is it gonna bother you if I eat this?"

"No no, of course not." He blinked, then decided to add, "nothing has appealed to me very much in the past few days."

To give his hands something to do, he poured himself half a cup of coffee, then seized the bowl of creamers and began emptying them into the mug one by one. Normally he couldn't tolerate his coffee in any fashion but completely black, but he liked the way the liquids mixed together, liked the gentle spirals of the cream turning the coffee the color of wet sand, then dry sand, then sawdust.

"I was thinking of going to England." His voice was flat.

"For the funeral?"

"No. A little after. I just wanna... I don't know. See where he came from. I want to tell his parents what a good friend he was to me."

He looked up to find Angela smiling sadly. "That sounds like a really nice idea." She paused, and Arastoo suddenly worried that she might cry. She didn't. "I hope you don't mind me saying, but the two of you never really made sense to me. But I liked it."

Arastoo had to smile a bit at that. He knew how mismatched they were: he, taciturn, a bit untrusting, and a bit too old for his age; and Vincent, so open, so talkative and so _young._ A man of faith and an atheist. A man who'd been to war and a kid who thought that spreading false rumors of his own sexual conquests was truly a _bad thing_. And yet, they worked. One night after attending the same lecture and recognizing each other as interns of Brennan, Vincent had asked Arastoo if he wanted to discuss the lecturer's conclusions over a drink. And then Arastoo had said, "I don't drink", and Vincent had said, "did you know that Mohammad is said to have recited the Qur'an once every year, but twice in the year that he died?" And then, suddenly, they were friends. They stayed friends even after Arastoo left the Jeffersonian, even after Vincent left reality altogether for a while. And when they both returned and Vincent was somehow suddenly a broken man, but even more of a child than he ever had been before, they were better friends than ever.

"It doesn't make sense to me, either," he agreed softly. "Maybe we we're just four-fielders sticking together."

Angela's eyebrows raised. "Okay, that sounds familiar, but you need to help me out a little bit."

Something inside Arastoo calmed down, however marginally, to have a concrete question to answer. "Anthropology has four subfields. Four-fielders study all of them, or at least believe that everyone should have a background in all of them. Forensic anthro is actually just a subfield of one of these subfields, physical. Then there's cultural and linguistic, and archaeology. Although, here's some Vincent trivia for you. In the UK, cultural anthro is called social anthro, and archaeology is its own thing. I actually knew that already, when he told me. But I didn't tell him that."

Angela laughed. "So the two of you were like liberal arts anthropologists?"

Arastoo smiled. "You could put it that way. Of course we both have specialties. But some anthropologists believe that physical anthro and archaeology should split from cultural and linguistic. They think the fields are becoming too dissimilar to be considered one discipline. But people like Vincent and me think that..." Midsentence, he stopped himself.

"What?" Angela prompted after a moment.

"Sorry. Just... did you hear that? I'm using the present tense. I've never done that before. I mean... I've lost people before, Angela," he said quietly. "When I was in the army, I lost friends. And besides that I've lost grandparents, and a cousin of mine. But I guess... they were all sick, or in danger. It wasn't so surprising. But I feel like... I can't even believe this. I can't understand it. Sorry," he added again. He could feel his hands trembling, and he blushed to think of himself showing such vulnerability.

"It's okay, Arastoo," Angela murmured. "This didn't make sense to any of us."

"True, but..." he sighed. "I'm sorry, Angela, but none of you were really friends with him. I was." Once the words were out, Arastoo could feel them lingering heavily in the air over the table, and he wished immediately that he could take them back. Angela's face was shifting, displaying some unreadable expression that he prayed wouldn't solidify into anger. When she spoke a moment later, he still couldn't tell what she was feeling.

"Brennan and Booth watched him die," she said coolly. "I didn't, but I heard the shot. We all miss him." Then at long last, she softened, and Arastoo felt him stomach marginally unclench. "But you're right," she amended. "We didn't know him well. And you did. And that's why I wanted to see you and see how you were." And then she pushed her plate aside, reached over the table, and took one of his hands in both of hers. Her skin was warm and dry, and not as soft as he would have imagined. He felt his fingers curl around hers.

"I'm not so great," he told her, and the effort that it took to get those four words out was so immense that he almost stopped there. But then he opened his mouth again, and found himself speaking. "No matter how strange it sounds, Vincent kept me sane. A lot of times everyone forgets that we work with _people_. Real people. Like with Samantha. She was a person. I can't just see these as isolated cases. I dunno... Vincent got that. When I decided to go back to cultural, he was the only one who understood why. Just to think... I'll never talk to him about that again. I'll never see him again. Never go on any double dates with girls from paleobotany or watch reruns of his ridiculous _Jeopardy_ saga..."

Angela squeezed his hand tightly, and Arastoo realized that there were tears in his eyes. He wiped them away hastily with his free hand and cleared his throat. Angela watched him steadily, he but didn't feel trapped under her gaze. He felt protected. Absurd, considering they were about the same age; her maternal instincts were just there already, apparently. He took a minute- lost himself to that safety- closed his eyes and tried to breathe calmly. It was difficult; a large part of him wanted to just break down and cry, because he was suddenly so lonely and so utterly adrift. He missed Vincent's surprisingly keen advice, missed his unsurprisingly awkward ramblings. He missed acting the straight man and the big brother to Vincent's playful childishness. Really, he just missed Vincent.

But Angela's thumb was stroking his gently, and gradually he came back under control. His heart rate slowed and his nose stopped stinging. Arastoo sighed and opened his eyes. Angela had closed hers as well; he squeezed her hands to attract her attention. She opened her eyes, looked straight at him, and smiled. She pulled her hands away and brushed her hair back from her face.

"We can go for a walk or something, if you want," she offered quietly. "To clear your mind or whatever."

"Actually, it's pretty clear," Arastoo admitted. "Plus, don't you want to finish your food?"

Angela eyed her congealing eggs and meats with distaste. "I'm done with protein. That happens. I just want something, and then I don't want it anymore. Mm. You know what I want? Raspberry pancakes. I've never been anywhere else that makes them, but they make them here and they're fantastic."

Suddenly Arastoo's stomach growled loudly, surprising them both. Angela raised her eyebrows as Arastoo smiled sheepishly.

"Sound good?" She asked teasingly.

"Actually," he admitted, "it does."


End file.
